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I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

jamesdrandall.com

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Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#131

Post by alex_suzuki »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #62

I'm 43. Took a year or so off from contracting after being flat out for years without taking any breaks, just poked around with some personal projects, did some stuff for my wife's company, petitioned the NHS to fix some stuff. Used Claude Code for much of it. Travelled a bit too. I feel like I turned around and there seem to be no jobs now (500+ applications deep is a lot when you've always been given the first role…

I’m 45 and contracted for over a decade before switching to product development. I used to still get inquiries from former customers, mainly for Java and Android work. But since about two years, it’s completely dried up. Anecdotally I’ve been hearing from friends who are still in the contracting/freelancing business that things are very tough right now. It makes sense to me, contractors are usually the first thing businesses cut when they’re either lowering their spending or becoming more efficient themselves.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#132

Post by probably_wrong »

weli wrote: post #17

> I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic. I’m fifty now, and the magic is different, and I’m learning to sit with that. Don't take this the wrong way but this is more of an age thing rather than a technology advancement thing. Kids growing up nowadays that are interested in computers grow…

> There is nothing intrinsic to computing nowadays that makes it less magic than fiddling around with config.sys

There definitely is: the rent-seeking behavior is out of control. As a kid I could fiddle with config.sys (or rather autoexec.bat) while nowadays wrestling a file path out of my phone is a battle and the system files of my phone are kept from me.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#134

Post by dgacmu »

raphman wrote: post #84
ossa-ma wrote: post #3

The irony of these "My craft is dead" posts is that they consistently, heavily leverage AI for their writing. So you're crying about losing one craft to AI while using AI to kill another. It's disingenuous. And yes it is so damn obvious.

The author admits that they used AI but I found it not that obvious. What are telltale signs in this case? While the writing style is a little bit over-stylized (exactly three examples in a sentence, Blade Runner reference), I might write in a similar style about a topic that im very emotional about. The actual content feels authentic to me.

(1) The pattern "It's not just a X---It's a Y" is super common in LLM-generated text for some reason. Complete with em dash. (I like em dashes and I wish LLMs weren't ruining them for the rest of us)

"Upgrading your CPU wasn’t a spec sheet exercise — it was transformative."

"You weren’t just a user. You were a systems engineer by necessity."

"The tinkerer spirit didn’t die of natural causes — it was bought out and put to work optimising ad clicks."

And in general a lot of "It's not , it's ", with or without an em dash:

"But it wasn’t just the craft that changed. The promise changed."

it's really verbose. One of those in a piece might be eye-catching and make someone think, but an entire blog post made up of them is _tiresome_.

(2) Phrasing like this seems to come out of LLMs a lot, particularly ChatGPT:

"I don’t want to be dishonest about this. "

(3) Lots of use of very short catch sentences / almost sentence fragments to try to "punch up" the writing. Look at all of the paragraphs after the first in the section "The era that made me":

"These weren’t just products. " (start of a paragraph)

"And the software side matched." (next P)

"Then it professionalised."

"But it wasn’t just the craft that changed."

"But I adapted." (a few paragraphs after the previous one)

And .. more. It's like the LLM latched on to things that were locally "interesting" writing, but applies them globally, turning the entire thing into a soup of "ah-ha! hey! here!" completely ignorant of the terrible harm it does to the narrative structure and global readability of the piece.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#135

Post by shafoshaf »

alexgarden wrote: post #48

Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different. Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw ) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code…

[55yo] My sense is that those problems we worked on in the 80s and 90s were like the perfectly balanced MMORPG. The challenges were tough, but with grit, could be overcome and you felt like you could build something amazing and unique. My voxel moment was passing parameters in my compilers class in college. I sat down to do it and about 12 hours later I got it working, not knowing if I could even do it.

With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#136

Post by ex-aws-dude »

sho_hn wrote: post #14

My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. My experience so far is that to a first approximation, the quality of the code/software generated with AI corresponds to the quality of the developer using the AI tool surprisingly well. An inexperienced, bad dev will still…

I think no one is better positioned to use these tools than experienced developers.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#137

Post by skydhash »

zozbot234 wrote: post #47

There's nothing "hollowed out" about directing an AI effectively, the feedback is as quick and tight as it always was. The trick is that you don't just "vibe code" and let the AI one-shot the whole thing: you should propose the change first and ask the AI about a good, detailed plan for implementing it. Then you review what the robot has proposed (which is trivial compared to revising code!) make sensible changes, as…

> you should propose the change first and ask the AI about a good, detailed plan for implementing

Why ask though?

If I’m familiar with a project, more often than not, I usually have a very good idea of the code I have to write within minutes of reading the ticket. Most of the time taken is finding the impact of the change, especially with dependencies that are present in the business domain, but are not reflected in the code.

I don’t need to ask what to code. I can deduce it as easily as doing 2+2. What I’m seeking is a reason not to write it the way I envisioned it. And if those reasons are technical, it’s not often a matter of code.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#138

Post by samiv »

alexgarden wrote: post #48

Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different. Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw ) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code…

I just told my gardener to cut the grass and work on some flower installations.

I'm so excited about gardening again. Can't wait to do some. Employing a gardener to do my gardening for me is really making me enjoy gardening again!

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#140

Post by Joel_Mckay »

alt227 wrote: post #38
weli wrote: post #17

> I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic. I’m fifty now, and the magic is different, and I’m learning to sit with that. Don't take this the wrong way but this is more of an age thing rather than a technology advancement thing. Kids growing up nowadays that are interested in computers grow…

> Don't take this the wrong way but this is more of an age thing rather than a technology advancement thing. I am much younger than the poster you are replying to, but I feel much the same.

LLM are not AI, but are a great context search tool when they work.

When people first contact ML, they fool themselves into believing it is intelligent... rather than a massive plagiarism and copyright IP theft machine.

Fun is important, but people thinking zero workmanship generated content is sustainable are still in the self-delusion stage marketers promote.

https://medium.com/ideas-into-action/ikigai-the-perfect-care...

I am not going to cite how many fads I've seen cycle in popularity, but many have seen the current active cons before. A firm that takes a dollar to make a dime in revenue is by definition unsustainable. =3

"The Ice King"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HVYHNTDOFs

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